ObamaCare #'s: Admin Lying or Incompetent

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius appeared Monday night on “The Daily Show” and said she didn’t know how many people had signed up for ObamaCare. “Fully enrolled?” Sebelius told host Jon Stewart. “I can’t tell you. I don’t know.” Someone ought to remind the Secretary that it is 2013, not 1913.

It is inconceivable, in the Internet age, that the Obama Administration doesn’t know how many people have enrolled in ObamaCare. The exchanges have been live for one week. Perhaps, because we’re talking about the federal government, it doesn’t have the real-time information that every other site on the Internet has, but it ought to have some rough numbers, at least. Websites today can easily track people on their sites in real-time. I could tell you how many people are on Breitbart News at thisvery second.

The issue is important, because the roll-out has been a mess. More importantly, if a sufficient number of people don’t enroll, the entire infrastructure of ObamaCare crashes down. After a wide media dragnet, the one person identified as having successfully enrolled turned out to be an OFA volunteer. He also hadn’t actually enrolled.

There really are only two explanations for this puzzle. First, they know exactly how many people have enrolled and are lying about it. The other possibility is that the Administration is so incompetent and the exchanges are so deficient that they really don’t have access to the numbers. Yet again, incompetence is the best-case explanation for some problem in the Obama Administration.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney has promised “monthly reports” in the future on enrollment figures. This is laughable. If the government can’t know on a real-time basis how many people are enrolling, how can it identify glitches, problems, or areas where they need to increase public education about the law?

How can the government even posit the idea that it should have more control over the health care system if it can’t identify how many people actually have coverage?